Slashing your carbon footprint in two steps: The energy-saving magic of heat pumps and EVs
A year ago, Frontier Group's Tony Dutzik installed heat pumps and replaced his gasoline-powered car with an electric vehicle. Here's what happened next.
Every year, more Americans are moving away from burning fossil fuels to heat their homes and power their cars, opting instead for clean, efficient heat pumps and electric vehicles. If America is to do its part in the fight against climate change, millions more will need to make the switch over the coming years.
Last year, our family joined that growing movement. We replaced our trusty gasoline-powered Honda Fit with a lightly used Kia Niro EV and retired the methane gas-fired boiler in our Boston home, installing heat pumps instead.
Being an energy wonk, I couldn’t resist crunching the numbers on how that decision affected our energy use and carbon pollution. The good news: those two actions alone cut our carbon footprint at home roughly in half – illustrating the critical importance of electrification in the fight against global warming. The equally good news: our heat pumps and EV have proven themselves to simply be better in a whole host of ways.
A quantum leap in efficiency
Heat pumps and EVs have two big advantages over fossil fuel-burning equipment. The first is that they can be powered with clean renewable energy, such as electricity from rooftop solar panels or wind farms. The second, often ignored, benefit is that they are dramatically more energy efficient than combustion-based systems.
EVs can be as much as four times as energy efficient as conventional vehicles. Our Kia Niro, for example, gets the equivalent of 112 miles per gallon of gas, compared with 29 mpg for our old Honda Fit. Heat pumps, similarly, are three to five times more energy efficient than gas boilers, since the electricity used in a heat pump moves heat from one place to another rather than creating it through combustion.
Those efficiency improvements show up in a big way in our household energy consumption numbers. The chart below shows the total amount of energy (electricity and gas, measured in British thermal units, or Btu) that our house has consumed monthly since the beginning of 2023, with the date of our energy transition highlighted in blue.
In the first seven months of 2023, mostly pre-electrification, we consumed 57.2 million Btu of energy in electricity and methane gas at our home. In the first seven months of 2024, by contrast, we consumed 33.9 million Btu, a reduction of 41%. That savings is likely an understatement, since it counts the electricity we’ve used to charge our EV as part of our electricity bill, but not the energy contained in the gasoline we used to use in our old car.
You can see the efficiency of the heat pump system kicking in during January and February, when our total monthly energy consumption was roughly half that of the previous year (even though it was a colder winter). You can also see the uptick in our energy use during June and July, when vehicle charging and our occasional use of air conditioning (an added perk of our transition to heat pumps) led to increased energy consumption at home.
Our reduced use of energy at home has translated into a reduction in our carbon footprint. To calculate the difference, I used the average carbon dioxide (CO2) per MWh of electric power produced in New England in 2022 from the U.S. EPA’s eGRID system. (We do purchase a 100% renewable energy product for our home through Boston’s community choice electricity program, but it’s not entirely fair to count our consumption of electricity as zero-carbon, for reasons too wonky to get into here.)
I estimate that in the first seven months of 2024, we cut our carbon footprint from home electricity and methane gas use by at least 41%. The figure is likely significantly higher since it doesn’t include the carbon we’ve saved by not having to refuel a gasoline-powered vehicle. While we don’t have good numbers on how much of our charging we did at home versus on the road, fueling our old Honda Fit for seven months would have created more than 3,000 additional pounds of CO2. We’re now avoiding most of those emissions.
Carbon dioxide production from home methane and electricity use, first seven months of 2023 vs. 2024.
From an environmental standpoint, our transition to heat pumps and an EV is making an immediate dent in our greenhouse gas emissions. But what about the rest of the experience?
So, how’s it going, really?
Beyond the environmental benefits of our heat pumps and EVs, we’ve also enjoyed other aspects of the transition. Rather than being awakened at 5 a.m. in the middle of winter by clanging pipes and hissing radiators, our heat pump system is whisper-quiet and still effective at keeping the house warm. As I mentioned above, we have whole-house air conditioning for the first time in more than 25 years – a luxury we try not to abuse. While we prefer not to drive at all, our EV is quiet, responsive and comfortable, and our few brushes with public charging have ranged from only mildly annoying to actually positive (giving us excuses to see cool stuff on road trips that we wouldn’t have otherwise had). We’ve gone more than a year without visiting a gas station or a Jiffy Lube and we don’t miss either.
The main downsides of our transition have been learning to live with new technologies that, while more advanced, are also more complicated – sometimes unnecessarily so. Our heat pump system can purify our air but you can’t readily program it to achieve a specific temperature at a particular time. As we at Frontier Group reported in 2019, charging an EV is way more complicated and a much bigger pain than it needs to be. More chargers will help, but more reliable chargers that use more flexible payment methods and fewer types of charging connectors can be just as impactful.
And then there are the dollars and cents. We’ve almost certainly saved money from transitioning to an EV, but the savings from our heat pump system will likely take a while to arrive. Our older, 1920s-era home required significant electrical work and posed other installation challenges, so our costs were likely higher than average. Meanwhile, with New England’s relatively high electricity prices, near-record low wholesale natural gas prices, and lack of programs to provide cheaper electricity rates for EV or heat pump users, the monetary savings on energy use aren’t quite as compelling as they should be.That’s all the more reason to consider carbon pricing for all fossil fuels and to adopt creative ways to make the transition to electric equipment – one that we need to make across society starting now – pencil out for households.
How you can “go electric”
The good news is that there are plenty of sources of funding out there that can help you to make the transition to clean electric home heating and EVs. If you are a resident of one of the growing number of states authorized to offer home energy rebates under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and you meet the law’s income thresholds, you may be able to install a heat pump or undertake energy efficiency improvements at dramatically reduced cost – even, potentially, for free. If you aren’t in one of those states, or don’t meet the income guidelines, you can still take advantage of the numerous clean energy tax credits under the IRA, which can reduce the cost of heat pumps, solar panels, energy efficiency improvements, new or used electric vehicles and much more. Many utilities and states offer their own incentive programs for clean energy technologies and/or low-interest loans to help homeowners afford the (often substantial) upfront costs of clean energy improvements.
A good starting point for your electrification journey is to check out the Clean Energy Home Toolkit from our partners at Environment America, which provides useful tips on how to get started.
Switching to heat pumps and an EV was a big step for our family, but we haven’t regretted it for a second. The environmental and climate benefits we’ve realized show the power of these technologies to help America kick our dependence on fossil fuels. Public policies like the incentives available under the IRA can help bring electrification within the reach of more American households. And sharing the stories of our own “electrification journeys” can help to demystify the process – inviting more people to make the leap to clean, efficient technologies that can contribute to a better future.
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Tony Dutzik
Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
Tony Dutzik is associate director and senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. His research and ideas on climate, energy and transportation policy have helped shape public policy debates across the U.S., and have earned coverage in media outlets from the New York Times to National Public Radio. A former journalist, Tony lives and works in Boston.